Bad translations

I happened to read the FW upgrade instructions in italian, and I must say they are not only wrong, but ridicolous aswell. Also, in some places they tell you to do the exact opposite of what you have to. The english instructions are correct, but the localized ones are worse than machine translation. This seem to be the case for most of the italian adaptation I checked. I assumed WD would be able to afford a decent translator, but it seems I was wrong. Which WD division should I contact to have them fixed?

Are you sure the update file is an official WD firmware update? At this moment WD doesn’t feature firmware update downloads for internal hard drives.

I was browsing the WD website, the official one, so I’m pretty sure the SW one finds there is official. It is. WD releases FW updates, they just are listed under another “name”. Check this for example:

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?wdc_lang=en&fid=wdsfNas_Red (english page, correct instructions)

Click on “WD Red SMART load/Unload utility 3.5” Drive": the “wd5741” file is a FW update (or you can call it a utility the modifies the FW) that modifies the behavior of the drive to wait longer before positioning the heads in their park position and turning off unnecessary electronics).

You can find this kind of “update” for most WD HDDs, since WD likes to have the heafds park themselves a little to aggressively, and users dislike that, expecially for external drives (I remember the 750GB Elements, it was unusable).

But that’s not the point. I was consideringout most italian instruction for WD software(s), not only FW, are badly translated, and asking if there’s a specific company division to contact for fixing those.

The WD Red SMART load/Unload utility is not a firmware update as it does not change, replace or modify the actual firmware. Even though the device’s behavior changes, the internal firmware revision remains the same. Think of it as an alternative “Mode 2” for the hard drive, like changing a WD My Book or WD Passport sleep timer by means of WD Drive Utilities or WD SmartWare, which are separate from the actual firmware update utility.

With regards to the translation, maybe you should try contacting WD’s Technical Support about this. You can do so either by phone or email.

To Contact WD for Technical Support
http://support.wdc.com/contact/index.asp?lang=en

Support by Country
http://support.wdc.com/country/index.asp

If it’s not a FW update, why does WD tells us " Please make sure that the computer system is not turned off during the firmware upgrade"? A FW update can change just a setting, a value, a single bit of the FW, and it’s still a FW update. FW is not like HW drivers. Think of of BIOS/EFI updates that just add a signature for newer OSes.

Anyway, I see you listed the usual general contacts / cuntry support.

I suppose this means I won’t get here more info than a search on the main site.

I don’t need support, it’s WD that needs better translators.

I should check french and german “adaptations” to see if I can have a good laugh at those too.

And after all I’m not paid to fix translations.

We have passed this along to support.

I suspect that “b0rked” is correct and that the utility modifies one or two bytes in firmware module 02 (in the System Area on the platters). Wdidle3 is another utility that modifies the same module.

One could verify this by dumping the firmware modules before and after applying the update.

http://sediv2008.narod.ru/Easy3.9Password01234567890.rar
http://sediv2008.narod.ru/Settings.rar

SeDiv WD Read ROM & Modules:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UgFfhkkAwY

b0rked wrote:

If it’s not a FW update, why does WD tells us " Please make sure that the computer system is not turned off during the firmware upgrade"? A FW update can change just a setting, a value, a single bit of the FW, and it’s still a FW update. FW is not like HW drivers. Think of of BIOS/EFI updates that just add a signature for newer OSes.

 

Anyway, I see you listed the usual general contacts / cuntry support.

I suppose this means I won’t get here more info than a search on the main site.

I don’t need support, it’s WD that needs better translators.

I should check french and german “adaptations” to see if I can have a good laugh at those too.

And after all I’m not paid to fix translations.

 

This has already been sent to the appropriate people for correction.

AISI, while the procedure actually modifies a particular firmware module, it’s not really what most people would describe as a firmware “update”. In fact module 02 is really just an information/configuration module rather than a code module. It stores the drive’s model number, serial number, passwords, idle timer settings, error recovery settings, native capacity, HPA settings, etc. Many of these settings can be altered with standard ATA commands by the end user. Others require the use of proprietary Vendor Specific Commands (VSC).

AISI, WD’s firmware “update” is akin to modifying the configuration settings in motherboard BIOS. These days most BIOS settings are written to flash memory, ie to the BIOS chip itself, rather than to CMOS RAM, as in the early days. Nobody would refer to this procedure as a BIOS update.

Yet another way of looking at it is to consider what happens when one enables Power Up In Standy (PUIS) using the ATA Set Features command. This command changes one byte in module 0D in the serial flash memory (aka “ROM”) on the PCB. Once again, nobody would refer to this as a firmware update.

That said, ISTM that WD’s documentation could do with some clarification.